For the love of furniture

Halifax designer Jess Tasker hopes her Trunk Studio line will soon become the quintessential Canadian brand

Halifax furniture designer Jess Tasker, who has taken her Trunk Studio line of furniture to Toronto’s Interior Design Show, poses in Halifax with the Station Chair, featured in NOW Magazine’s Shopping IDS article. Below is the trunk studio’s approach coffee table. (PETER PARSONS / Staff)

FURNITURE DESIGNER Jess Tasker loves being Canadian.

“Some people say we don’t have a culture, but I think that we do.”

Her mission is to celebrate the country in designs rooted in Canada’s culture and landscape.

Tasker spent the last year and a half designing the Trunk Studio line, which she is showcasing this week at the Interior Design Show, the biggest event for the design profession in Canada, at the Toronto Convention Centre.

Trunk Studio was accepted into the invitation-only Studio North section for emerging designers. She is debuting the Station Chair, the Scout Side Table, the Approach Coffee Table and a Toque Wall Rack on the Canadian and International design scenes.

The Station Chair combines Canadian culture with Tasker’s Danish ancestry.

“I wanted a lounge chair that you could really curl up in and read a book,” says Tasker, talking in her Halifax home before she drove to Toronto.

The chair, which comes in walnut and birch, is wide enough to sit cross-legged in, with sleek arms, widening where elbows would rest. It has echoes of Muskoka and Adirondack chairs, “and that’s a very Canadian thing.”

Tasker intends to conjure the Canadian wilderness and evoke memories of canoe trips and snowshoeing through the woods. She wants the cushions to evoke “the Canadian feel of a warm blanket on a cold night.”

The chair is built by Windsor Junction’s Expressions of Wood. The cushions are made by Ace Upholstery, of Halifax, out of blankets from MacAusland Woolen Mills, P.E.I., or from a gorgeous, durable 70 per cent wool blend of Hallingdal fabric from Kvadrat in Denmark.

For all her furniture she uses walnut and birch, “which is expensive but it will last longer.”

It’s important to her that the furniture be made in this province.

“They’re not cheap to build in Nova Scotia, but when I founded the company I wanted everything to be made in Canada and made well.”

The chair costs from $1,950 to $2,150, “but it’s a piece that will last you forever.”

“I think it’s more important to buy quality. We live in a world where everyone knows the cost of everything but the value of very little.”

Tasker’s love affair with furniture started with a wooden trunk that her parents gave her as a child.

“It’s made of pine and my parents were given it on their wedding day.”

She has always loved the simplicity of this trunk, which sits in her living room.

She grew up with furniture of “very, very simple shapes.”

“I’d almost say it was a Mennonite style. We had a great big pine table in the kitchen and two benches on either side.”

Tasker has the same arrangement in her own kitchen.

“I’m not into ornate. I like really clean lines and I like the wood to be highlighted because I think wood grain is so beautiful.”

Later, she discovered Danish-born American designer Jens Risom.

“When I saw his stuff I fell in love with it.

“There is definitely a Danish modern influence in my work but I’m trying to create a Canadian esthetic.

“You know how the Swiss Army knife belongs to Switzerland. I would love for Trunk Studio to be the quintessential Canadian brand.”

While her furniture features a minimalist look and hidden storage spaces that would suit a small urban space, she sees it as being equally “at home” in a cottage or country house.

Tasker first came to Nova Scotia as an 18-year-old rugby player and kinesiology student at St. Francis Xavier University. She minored in art, which she had studied extensively in both grade and high school in Toronto.

After graduating from St. F.X. (she wears the X ring), she worked as a carpenter’s apprentice for two years before deciding to start her own company.

She admits to lots of sleepless nights.

“It’s an adrenalin-pumping exercise. There’s the option of doing it or of not doing it. The option of not doing it was unacceptable.”

She brands the wood with her Trunk Studio logo. The company name is a reference to the pine trunk her parents gave her and to an elephant’s trunk.

Tasker loves elephants and owns an elephant table her grandmother bought in Africa, a jade elephant her mother gave her, and the elephant statues she bought in India during a trip two years ago to visit her brother, who is a Tibetan Buddhist monk.

“There is a real spiritual connection between my family and India,” says Tasker.

In her company name, she wanted to refer to the Indian elephant-headed god Ganesh, who is “a sign of good luck and prosperity.”

Also, “everything is made of solid wood from a tree trunk.”

Tasker rented a van and drove to Toronto with fellow Halifax designer Geof Ramsay, who is also featured at the show.

There are a lot of craftspeople in Nova Scotia making furniture, “but in terms of creating a furniture line, a label, in Nova Scotia, there’s no one else,” says Tasker, who sells through her website and on consignment at J&R Grimsmo fashion boutique on Barrington Street in Halifax.

Even though the design scene is stronger in Vancouver and Toronto, “I really want success in Nova Scotia.”